On emergent organization designs, future of work, and the impact of the digital era..

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Becoming a Social Business -- Beyond Culture Change

A paradigm shift occurs when
prevailing mental model has so many egregious anomalies that it “breaks” and a
new mental model of the world is perceived to be a better explanation of how
the world works. ~Steve Denning

Our words define our worldview.
We use the vocabulary available to us to describe and analyze our experiences
and perceptions. The founder of the idea
that language and worldview are inextricable is William von Humboldt, the
Prussian philologist. The German word Weltanschauung—used
to represent the mode of apprehending reality of a community—was first used by
Kant and later popularized by Hegel. Weltanschauung represents the collective consciousness
of a community of a certain experience.

In this context, I had a bit
of an epiphany. Over the past few years, the need to become a social business and
to promote enterprise-wide collaboration have taken hold in many organizations.
The usual approach is to launch an enterprise collaboration platform (technology
first being easy to do) and hope that people will engage and contribute with a
bit of cajoling and coercing. But a majority of these endeavors fail leading to
skepticism and finger pointing. The usual culprits are the hapless organizational culture closely followed by
hierarchy and leadership lethargy. We have become accustomed to blaming the
culture of an organization for the failure of any initiative, and more so when
the change calls for redefining and re-imagining how people work and interact. Before
I proceed further, let me clarify that these culprits are not blameless. A fair
number of mistakes can be attributed to them. I only want to say these do not invoke
the complete picture. We have to dive deeper to understand why organizations
across the world – from the Americas to Asia – are apparently making the same
mistakes.

We have to take a step back
and examine the metaphors and the discourse that organizations abide by and are
described by. The crux of the problem lies in our inability to see how the
culture of organizations stem from and is shaped by the very discourse of
management that we have collectively subscribed to ever since the Industrial Revolution
and the manufacturing era. No matter how hard we try to change the culture –
and I do believe that leaders and managers are trying – the discourse we use
lets us down. The words become reality.
Currently, our management discourse is permeated by the language of two metaphors
– the military and the manufacturing. The business model and
operating principles in today’s organizations hinge on “making” profit through
the deft use of limited resources in an organized manner. The military metaphor
dominates the world of business – right from “staff”, “line”, “chain of command”,
to “war for talent”, “competitive strategy”, and “line of fire”. The assumption is that doing business
is akin to waging war and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Organizations thus
begin to behave with an almost “military” mindset – valuing planning over innovation,
dwelling on constraints over opportunities, giving in to enforcing over
enabling, compliance over collaboration…

Underlying this military and
manufacturing discourse is an insidious and difficult to pin down aspect – the scarcity mindset – be it of money,
skills, information, time, talent, and so on. A world defined by scarcity is driven
by the ethos of competition, hoarding, survival of the fittest, suspicion,
exclusion, elimination of the other, and
fear. These concepts are fundamentally opposed to the principle and values that
support cooperation and collaboration – the pillars of social business and
authentic communities. As long as our organizations are operating under the
principle of scarcity, we will continue to struggle to get people engaged and
motivated enough to collaborate. The words we use not only reflect but also reinforce
and reproduce the reality. The words become
reality.

Now, let’s look at the words
that come to mind when we thing “community” which has its root in the Latin
word “communitas” meaning things held in common. Community elicits
in my mind words like commune, abundance, love, wholeness, trust, belonging,
authenticity, creation, safety, inclusion… and other similar words. As anyone
who has ever been or aspires to be a community manager, we know that these are
the emotions that we have to inspire in our users for them to become engaged
and collaborative community members. However, the discourse that defines
community within organizations get subsumed under the larger discourse of the
organization itself which, as I have already mentioned, is defined by scarcity
and competition. When the two discourses clash, the larger one signifying the
organization as a whole inevitably wins. The
words become reality.

Let me make a disclaimer. This
clash is not the fault of managers or leaders taking the organization forward –
in most cases, it is done in good faith. Controls are put in place to prevent
information from going to competitors; non-compliance is punished; transparency
is censored to prevent general dissent. And we simplistically club all of these
under the umbrella of an amorphous and ambiguous culture and dismiss it by saying that “the culture of the
organization is not conducive to collaboration”. We have to identify the words
that run counter to authenticity, trust and transparency and replace them with
a different set of words when speaking about organizations. Words carry their
own denotation and connotation and define our consciousness. It might seem like
a trivial matter, but it truly has deep implications for the kind of transformation
organizations need to go through in order to become authentic communities.

The discourse of communities
doesn’t and cannot hinge on and around scarcity. We need to redefine and
reimagine the very description of an organization itself. What if we were to
define an organization like a community: “Self-organized network of people with
common agenda, cause, or interest, who collaborate by sharing ideas, information,
and other resources...” (Wikipedia). We have to shift from the old ways of
working that was driven by extrinsic motivation – bonus, salary hike, promotion,
and other tangible rewards to one that is driven from the heart, that engages
people intrinsically by giving them the autonomy, providing the purpose and
creating a sense a belonging. Jeremy Scrivens writes in his post, The
Future of Work is Social Business at Scale, “…authenticity is not only the foundation of collaboration and
innovation, it is the very experience of being well - being who you really are
- Being! not just doing.”

Tangible rewards are limited,
and hence automatically lead to competition and fight for survival. In contrast,
intrinsic motivation, authenticity, trust, and kindness stem from a deeper
source of abundance. Organizations need to shift their paradigms and transform
at a far deeper level than we are currently addressing. To see real impact, and deep and lasting transformation, we have to
attack the root, and reimagine the organizational metaphor.